Great Results, But Even Greater Expectations

As of Friday, about 85% of S&P 500 companies had reported earnings and it’s been a surprisingly good season. Per FactSet, 71% of companies reported earnings above estimates and more than half had beaten on revenue. Things have been going so well, S&P 500 companies are on track to post their first quarter of year-over-year earnings growth since Q1 2015 and the first quarter of year-over-year revenue growth since Q4 2014.

Despite Amazon’s (NSDQ: AMZN) fairly spectacular miss, the technology sector has done particularly well. Big names like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) and Alphabet (NSDQ: GOOG) all easily beat projections, and Facebook blew analyst estimates out of the water. The strong performance has created similarly optimistic expectations though; despite beating expectations Facebook’s shares dropped when the company said it looked for “meaningfully” slower ad revenue growth in the coming quarters. It’s got to sting when you rock out your quarterly numbers but still get dinged on a weak forecast.

That’s also what happened to our own Zendesk (NYSE: ZEN). It reported that third-quarter revenue rose 45% year-over-year to $80.7 million and its net loss narrowed from $0.05 a year ago to $0.04. Despite beating on both earnings and revenue, the stock is still down 11.6% after the company said it expects fourth-quarter revenue to come in between $86 million and $88 million, or growth of about 38%.

That would be stellar guidance for most any other company and, really, it’s not bad for Zendesk, either. The problem is that management has said its goal is to reach $1 billion in annual revenue by 2020 and, to hit that mark, it needs to average annualized revenue growth of 34%. Zendesk’s investors seem to be worried that 38% growth in the fourth quarter is cutting things a little too close, so $1 billion might be too ambitious.

Management has said its quarterly performance and guidance was impacted by more downtime than expected following hacker attacks. It also said that it “realigned [it’s] sales and marketing activities” and that caused more employee turnover and disruption than expected. Management didn’t really elaborate on those issues but, based on the company’s overall performance, it sounds like the problems were more an issue of internal execution than a dip in business.

That’s never something you want to hear, but I think those issues are being addressed. Zendesk brought on a new CIO in the second quarter and just recently merged its infrastructure and technology under his leadership, which should help address uptime and security issues. Zendesk has also been closing contracts with larger organizations, with the number of signed contracts with an annual value of $50,000 or more up 44% in the quarter. On top of that, the percentage of recurring revenue generated by customers with more than 100 agents rose from 31% last year to 33%.

So for now, I think it’s too soon to call Zendesk’s $1 billion by 2020 too ambitious. It looks to me like this was more of a one-off quarterly stumble rather than a bigger problem, so with the steps being taken to address the issues and the new product roll-outs still to come, I think Zendesk will stay on track to hit its target.

Zendesk is still a buy under $25.

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